A bird with red-striped plumage and a long tail turns its head to look backwards as it makes its way across the mosaic pavement of the Byzantine Basilica di San Vitale at Ravenna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. The church was consecrated in AD 547, but although some of the floor mosaics are original Byzantine work, especially at the periphery, others are more recent or are reconstructions.
Ravenna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy: a bird with red-striped plumage and a long tail turns its head to look backwards as it makes its way across the mosaic pavement of the Byzantine Basilica di San Vitale, which was consecrated in 547 AD. Some floor mosaics in the church are original Byzantine work, especially at the periphery, but others, including a labyrinth, are more recent or are reconstructions. In the apse, the pavement was decorated with mosaic in eight triangular slices radiating from a central medallion. Six segments were remade in the 1540s, while the other two were remade in the early 1700s. In 1931, excavation revealed two segments of the original floor, after which the entire pavement was lowered to that level. The two 18th century segments were replaced by restored original mosaic. The Basilica di San Vitale is dedicated to Saint Vitalis, said to have been tortured and buried alive by the Romans on this site. Ravenna, on Italy’s northern Adriatic coast, was once the capital of the Western Roman Empire. It was captured by Constantinople from the Ostrogoths in 540 AD and the church, founded under Ostrogoth rule, was decorated with vivid mosaics over the next few years. Ravenna is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, renowned as Western Europe’s greatest centre for the study of Byzantine art and architecture.
Size: 4288px × 2848px
Location: Basilica di San Vitale, Ravenna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy.
Photo credit: © Terence Kerr / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
Keywords: &, 547, ad, architecture, art, avian, basilica, bird, byzantine, christian, christianity, church, close-, colourful, , detail, di, early, eastern, emilia-romagna, empire, floor, heritage, italian, italy, kerr, life, long, medieval, mosaic, mosaics, motif, orthodox, orthodoxy, paleo-christian, pavement, plumage, ravenna, reconstruction, red-striped, renewed, restoration, restored, roman, san, site, st, stepping, symbolic, symbols, tail, terence, tesserae, unesco, vitale, vitalis, walking, world
